Preface
The cloud has risen in popularity and function in the past few years. Storing data and consuming computing resources on a third party's hardware reduces the overhead of operations by keeping the number of people and owned assets low. For a small company, this could be an opportunity to expand operations, whereas for a large company, this could help to streamline costs. The cloud not only abstracts the management of the hardware that an end user consumes, it also creates an on-demand provisioning capability that was previously not available to consumers. Traditionally, provisioning new hardware or virtualized hardware was a fairly manual process that would often lead to a backlog of requests, thus stigmatizing this way of provisioning resources as a slow process.
The cloud grew in popularity mostly as a public offering in the form of services accessible to anyone on the Internet and operated by a third party. This paradigm has implications for how data is handled and stored and requires a link that travels over the public Internet for a company to access the resources they are using. These implications translate into questions of security for some use cases. As the adoption of the public cloud increased in demand, a private cloud was birthed as a response to addressing these security implications. A private cloud is a cloud platform operated without a public connection, inside a private network. By operating a private cloud, the speed of on-demand visualization and provisioning could be achieved without the risk of operating over the Internet, paying for some kind of private connection to a third party, or the concern of private data being stored by a third-party provider.
Enter OpenStack, a cloud platform. OpenStack began as a joint project between NASA and Rackspace. It was originally intended to be an open source alternative that has compatibility with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud offering. Today, OpenStack has become a key player in the cloud platform industry. It is in its fifth year of release, and it continues to grow and gain adoption both in its open source community and the enterprise market.
In this book, we will explore the components of OpenStack. Today, OpenStack offers virtualization of compute, storage, networking, and many other resources. We will walk though installation, use, and troubleshooting of each of the pieces that make up an OpenStack installation. By the end of this book, you should not only recognize OpenStack as a growing and maturing cloud platform, but also have gained confidence in setting up and operating your own OpenStack cluster.
